How Do You Solve a Problem Like Oscar Hammerstein?

Of all the Broadway musicals written between the consolidation of the genre in the early ’20s and the start of its decline in the mid-’60s, only 20 or so are now revived regularly. Five of them—Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951),and The Sound of Music (1959)—feature lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and music by Richard Rodgers, while a sixth, Show Boat (1927), was written by Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. Hammerstein also wrote the books for five of these shows (the exception is The Sound of Music), and those librettos define to this day how a “normal” musical is constructed. He is thus by definition the most important and influential figure in the history of musical comedy.

No one questions Hammerstein’s historical significance, nor does the popularity of these six musicals show any sign of diminishing. But there is a gap between that popularity and the esteem in which he is held by many critics. Kenneth Tynan summed up the conventional wisdom about the alleged sentimentality and naiveté of Hammerstein’s work when he dismissed The Sound of Music as “a show for children of all ages, from six to about eleven and a half.” Stephen Sondheim, Hammerstein’s protégé, put it more forgivingly when he described him as “easy to make fun of because he is so earnest.”

Hammerstein affected to be unfazed by such criticisms. “In my book,” he told Mike Wallace in a 1958 TV interview, “there’s nothing wrong with sentiment because the things we’re sentimental about are the fundamental things in life, the birth of a child, the death of a child or of anybody, falling in love.” Yet they continue to be made, if less often today than in the past, and Todd S. Purdum engages directly with them in Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution, an introduction to the lives and work of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Its first chapter is actually titled “The Sentimentalist.”* But Purdum is a political journalist, not a student of theater, and his book neither breaks new biographical ground nor offers fresh insights into the interior lives of its subjects. It is hard to see for whom Something Wonderful was written other than readers who know nothing whatsoever about either man, nor does it seem likely that its publication will have any discernible effect on their reputations, critical or otherwise.

About Rodgers’s reputation, of course, there is no doubt. Long before he ended his partnership with Lorenz Hart and started writing with Hammerstein, he was universally regarded as having (in the words of Leonard Bernstein) “established new levels of taste, distinction, simplicity in the best sense, and inventiveness” in popular song. But what about his second collaborator? Will Oscar Hammerstein be remembered merely as a shrewd craftsman who knew what the public wanted and gave it to them? Or will he be seen as a giant in his own right?

Hammerstein called himself “a strange man,” and while that is an exaggeration, his personality was far from simple. Born in New York in 1895, he was the oldest son of a mixed marriage (his father was a fully assimilated second-generation German Jew, his mother a Presbyterian Scot) and carefully steered clear throughout his career of subject matter indicative in any way of his Jewish background, though he made no attempt to conceal it. He broke up his first marriage after falling in love at first sight with another man’s wife, leading to a union that was not merely successful but all-consumingly so: He reserved his emotions for Dorothy, his second wife, treating his children in a distant, often aggressively competitive manner and running his professional life in much the same way. Adored by his friends, he was seen by his colleagues as a canny and ruthless businessman who could be, as the director Joshua Logan put it, “tough as nails.”

It was Hammerstein’s own theatrical family—his father was a vaudeville producer, his paternal grandfather an opera impresario—that determined his destiny. He started writing for the stage in college, teaming up with the composers Rudolf Friml, Otto Harbach, and Sigmund Romberg to create European-style operettas. Even then, he sought to create shows whose songs were firmly rooted in their dramatic action, and he also longed to junk the fluffy plots that dominated the genre. But Hammerstein had no knack for coming up with original storylines, and it was not until he started adapting preexisting source material that he found himself as an artist.

Seven years after Hammerstein’s first Broadway show opened, he and Jerome Kern wrote Show Boat, a stage version of Edna Ferber’s bestselling 1926 novel and the first musical in which serious subjects (among them murder and miscegenation) were treated on stage. But the success of its original production, which ran for a year and a half, failed to persuade other producers that theatergoers were eager to embrace similar fare, and while several of the later songs that Hammerstein wrote with Kern, including “All the Things You Are” and “The Song Is You,” became standards, he wrote no hit shows between 1932 and 1943.

Hammerstein then teamed up with Rodgers, whose long-standing collaboration with Lorenz Hart had been derailed by Hart’s alcoholism. It had already run its course in any case, for Hart was incapable of writing the books for his own shows, and he and Rodgers, both of whom longed to do more challenging work on Broadway, found it impossible as a result to realize their shared ambitions. When Rodgers invited Hammerstein to work on a musical version of Green Grow the Lilacs, a 1930 play by Lynn Riggs about pioneer life in what would become the state of Oklahoma, Hammerstein accepted with alacrity.

By then he had long since perfected his lyric-writing style, turning out songs that were noteworthy for their seemingly effortless combination of frank emotionalism and directness of utterance (“Why was I born? / Why am I living?”). To this he now added an increased determination to do again what he and Kern had already done so well in Show Boat, writing an entire show in which the emotional stakes are involvingly high and every musical number is painstakingly integrated into the show’s dramatic arc, propelling it forward instead of standing apart from it.

To this end, Rodgers and Hammerstein broke with Broadway tradition by reversing the order in which they wrote their songs. Instead of setting his lyrics to Rodgers’s preexisting tunes, Hammerstein usually wrote them first, after which Rodgers set them to music. This made it easier for them to break free from the rigid formal strictures of repeating-chorus “golden age” popular song, and it also allowed Hammerstein to plunge further into his own deep well of feeling, thereby encouraging Rodgers to write music more expansive than the brilliant show tunes to which Hart had previously set his lyrics. In addition, Hammerstein shunned his predecessor’s elaborate wordplay, opting for straightforwardness (“I can see the stars gittin’ blurry / When we ride back home in the surrey”) over Hart’s self-conscious virtuosity (“I’m wild again! / Beguiled again! / A simpering, whimpering child again”).

Hammerstein looked to his source material not just for song cues but for actual inspiration as well. Consider Riggs’s opening stage direction of Green Grow the Lilacs:

It is a radiant summer morning several years ago, the kind of morning which, enveloping the shapes of earth—men, cattle in the meadow, blades of the young corn, streams—makes them seem to exist now for the first time, their images giving off a visible golden emanation.

In addition to yielding up the lyrics of “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” which describe “a bright, golden haze on the meadow” and corn that “looks like it’s climbin’ clear up to the sky,” this passage gave Hammerstein the idea to start Oklahoma! not with the customary rousing full-ensemble chorus but with the plainest of stage pictures, a lone woman churning butter while a cowboy is heard singing offstage. Here as elsewhere, he shook off the tired conventions of the musicals of the ’20s and ’30s, preferring emotional force to fizzy frivolity (Oklahoma! hinges on the sexual awakening of one character and the killing of another) and designing a tightly knit structural template in which each successive song pushes the show inexorably closer to its climax.

Aside from the shows themselves, it is this formal template that is Hammerstein’s chief contribution to the American musical. Virtually every Broadway musical to have held the stage since 1943 has been structured in a way similar to that of Oklahoma!* Shortly before Oklahoma! opened, Hammerstein told his son that it was “different [from] and higher in its intent” than other musicals. The same was true of Carousel, an Americanized version of Ferenc Molnár’s 1909 play Liliom that contains what Sondheim calls “the single most important moment in the revolution of contemporary musicals.” Sondheim is referring to the “bench scene,” a 12-minute-long near-operatic scena during which the show’s two principal characters discover and reveal their love for each other in an exquisitely sustained melding of speech and song: “If I loved you, / Words wouldn’t come in an easy way— / Round in circles I’d go!”**

Except for George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), which was conceived as a full-scale grand opera, no previous Broadway show had contained so ambitious and completely realized a piece of music drama. It has to be said that the flawless first act of Carousel is followed by a finale in which Hammerstein comes perilously close to letting genuine sentiment spill over into sticky sentimentality, above all in “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which is invariably cited by those who dislike his work (“At the end of the storm is a golden sky, / And the sweet silver song of a lark”). Even so, it still brings Carousel to a dramatically convincing close when sung and staged with disciplined understatement.

The hallmark of Carousel and Oklahoma! is their untragic idealism, which is central to their mass appeal. They embody a quintessentially American vision of life, one in which the inescapable pain and suffering of human existence—not excluding violent death—can be ameliorated by the power of love. Nor was this vision insincere, at least in Hammerstein’s case (Rodgers’s personality was more opaque). He described himself as “one-third realist and two-thirds mystic,” and every word he wrote came straight from the heart. When he urged Sondheim not to imitate him, he said, “Don’t write what I feel. I really believe all this stuff. You don’t.” Had he not believed it, he could never have written “If I Loved You,” which Rodgers set to a melody (it is no mere tune) of Tschaikovskian amplitude that is worthy of his partner’s wholly felt words.

Having charted the future course of the American musical, Hammerstein longed to try something new. But his desire to keep on innovating exceeded his ability to do so, as he and Rodgers proved with Allegro (1947), in which they threw out their rulebook and wrote an experimental musical that uses a quasi-Greek chorus to tell the story of an Everyman-like small-town doctor. Hammerstein’s book, ingenious though it is, borders on the faux-naïf (“Gosh! Is everybody in this town going to have their babies today?”), while Rodgers’s music is pleasant but largely unmemorable.

The two men then returned to form with South Pacific and The King and I, whose scores are resplendently beautiful, though both shows, South Pacific in particular, are marred by Hammerstein’s obtrusive liberal didacticism: “You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late / Before you are six or seven or eight / To hate all the people your relatives hate.” (Rodgers himself admitted in 1968 that Hammerstein’s “one fault” was that he was “too preachy.”) Nevertheless, they continue to be revived, not merely because of the quality of their songs but also because of the sureness of Hammerstein’s dramatic carpentry.

The duo’s first four hits seem to have exhausted their powers of creative renewal, for they were followed by two forgotten flops, Me and Juliet (1953) and Pipe Dream (1955), and the commercially successful but now irretrievably dated Flower Drum Song (1958). By then, their energies were being diverted into the production of overblown widescreen film versions of their stage shows.

While they scored two more successes with The Sound of Music and a TV version of Cinderella (1957), neither is comparable in artistic quality to its predecessors, in part because Hammerstein, who was already suffering from the stomach cancer that killed him in 1960, turned over the task of writing the book of the former show to Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. These old pros yielded to the temptation to indulge in the florid sentimentality of which Hammerstein had mostly steered clear and to which he now succumbed in some of his own lyrics, the last he ever wrote. The colossal success of The Sound of Music (and its 1965 film version) cemented his posthumous reputation as a merchant of kitsch, and it was taken for granted decades after his death that all his musicals had become period pieces.

Yet Hammerstein’s songs and shows continued to be sung and staged, and a dark-hued 1992 Royal National Theatre revival of Carousel brought about a critical reevaluation of his work whose effects have proved to be lasting. Today he is generally acknowledged as a major figure, and only blinkered snobs now feel the need to apologize for appreciating his best work with both Rodgers and Kern, much less for admiring the dramaturgical innovations that, in Stephen Sondheim’s words, “changed the texture of the American musical theater forever.” He is, in fact, one of America’s greatest and most characteristic artists, a genius whose open-eyed optimism is a reflection of our national character as it once was and may yet be.

Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!

For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.

European Union bureaucrats love to speak of “European values,” and their media allies on both sides of the Atlantic take it for granted that the EU stands for all that is good and just on the international scene. For a certain type of journalist or NGO worker, if the EU does or says something, that act or statement must be admirable by dint of the fact that it originated in Brussels. Yet too often, the EU stands for diplomacy for its own sake, process for its own sake, bureaucracy for its own sake–even when insisting on diplomacy, process, and bureaucracy for their own sake ends up empowering murderous enemies of European values.

Nowhere is this dynamic more visible than in the bloc’s hysteric response to President Trump’s decisions to withdraw Washington from the flawed Iran deal and move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. In a statement posted to her blog, EU foreign-policy chief Federica Mogherini made it clear that she views America and Israel as the Middle East’s real troublemakers. The blog post was notable for the cold tone Mogherini took with Washington. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime and Hamas, those unshakable friends of European values, came out unscathed.

Here’s Mogherini on her efforts to save the Iran deal:

On Tuesday I gathered in Brussels the Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and the Foreign Ministers of France, Germany and the United Kingdom – the three European countries that negotiated the deal together with the US, Russia and China. We decided to start working on a package of measures to protect the deal, to make sure that Iranian citizens can enjoy the benefits of it, and to safeguard our economic interests. Our goal is to maintain and deepen our economic ties–including with new projects, starting with energy and transport–while defending and incentivising small and medium enterprises investing in Iran . . . There is a metaphor [sic] that came up several times over the last few days: the deal is like a patient in intensive care, and our shared goal is to restore it to health as soon as possible.

As for the Jerusalem move and the other crises in the region, Mogherini said:

Once again the European Union is the reliable partner, and it is indispensable in such a moment of instability for the Middle East. We continue to go through dramatic events: from the clashes on the border between Israel and Syria, to the unspeakable suffering of the Yemeni people, to tens of deaths in Gaza after the move of the US Embassy to Jerusalem . . . As the European Union, we won’t stop working to find a political solution to all these crises: there is no other way to reach a just and lasting peace.

From the mullahs’ nuclear-weapons program to Hamas’s calculated campaign to rush the barrier fence with Israel to the Iranian-led insurgency in Yemen, Mogherini and the EU see only diplomatic challenges to overcome. And the answer is always, always to convene a gabfest in Basel, Lausanne, Vienna or some other plush Continental city, where civilizational clashes and historic animosities and sharp moral contrasts can be dissolved in technical solutions.

Never mind that the Iranian nuclear deal on its own terms puts Tehran on the glide path to the bomb, and never mind that it fails to address the mullahs’ missile program, regional aggression, and human-rights violations. “We had a process,” say the Brussels mandarins, “and that process must be preserved at all costs.” Never mind that Hamas is constitutionally committed to the destruction of world Jewry and has been staging terror attacks and bloody stunts for decades. “We had a process,” say the mandarins, “and Trump’s embassy move disrupts the process.” In this worldview, the likes of Iran and the Palestinians can appear as friends and good guys, because they cynically embrace European process games. All the while, the U.S. and Israel are cast as the bad guys since they don’t play geopolitics the European way.

Along with Mogherini, Barack Obama and Angela Merkel epitomized this bankrupt mindset. One of the three, Obama, has already exited the world stage. The tectonic electoral shifts underway in Europe mean the other two are likely to fade sooner than later.

Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!

For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.

This behavior lends itself to quite a few descriptors, but you cannot call it a cult. The cult leader is nigh infallible, but that is not Ginsburg’s role. Her relationship with the flock is transactional, and she can transgress against progressive tenets as easily as anyone. When Ginsburg called former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick “arrogant” for leading his teammates in a “dumb and disrespectful” protest against the American flag, for example, the liberal blogosphere rose up in revolt. Some went so far as to imply rather unambiguously that Ginsburg’s anachronistic lack of racial consciousness rendered her undeserving of the left’s veneration.

Identity politics is relatively shallow politics, and Ginsburg’s transgression was soon forgotten under a mountain of substance. Her value to the liberal movement as a lifetime appointee to the nation’s highest court is self-evident, but it is her unique facility for lending intellectual heft to the left’s ideological pragmatism and single-mindedness that makes her so important to Democrats and their allies in media. The reaction to Monday’s Supreme Court decision in Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis illustrates this phenomenon.

In that decision, the Supreme Court determined that employers can appeal to the arbitration clauses in the contracts that non-union employees sign to prevent those employees from joining class-action lawsuits against them. “In the Federal Arbitration Act, Congress has instructed federal courts to enforce arbitration agreements according to their terms—including terms providing for individualized proceedings,” Justice Neal Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion. “This court is not free to substitute its preferred economic policies for those chosen by the people’s representatives.”

That 5-4 decision was correctly interpreted by much of the press as a blow to organized labor, but the political media was led to that conclusion by Justice Ginsburg, whose dramatic reaction to this ruling was designed to generate as much attention as possible. In an uncommon move, Ginsburg read a portion of her dissenting opinion from the bench. “Federal labor law does not countenance such isolation of employees,” she said, fretting that the Court’s “egregiously wrong” decision may lead to the “underenforcement” of other statutes protecting workers’ rights. Yet Ginsburg appeared to reinforce the majority’s logic when she noted the ambiguity of the National Labor Relations’ Act’s handling of arbitration and suggested that Congress needed to update federal labor laws. Even her Democratic allies, like New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, reinforced her contention that Congress should act to resolve this ambiguity.

That vagueness was hard to find in reported accounts of events in the Supreme Court on Monday. Rather than approach reporting around this issue as though it were a complex matter on which the Court carefully found grounds to rule as it did, media professionals took their cues from Ginsberg’s personal conduct. CNN’s “legal analyst and supreme court biographer,” Joan Biskupic, wrote that “the gloves are off and the collar is on.” That is, her “classic dissenting collar,” tastefully adorned with “silver crystal accents,” which Ginsburg adopts when she reads her dissents aloud. “So dire was her warning,” Biskupic continued, that Gorsuch was compelled to spend five of his 25 pages rebutting her dissent.

Indeed, Ginsburg’s perspective was the angle taken in many press accounts of this ruling, but they did not strictly adhere to her logic. Again and again, news outlets and analysts lamented the effects that this decision might have on non-unionized workers, not the vagueness of the law, in order to buttress a predetermined conclusion. NPR called the decision “a major blow to workers” that stopped them from banding “together to challenge violations of federal labor laws.” The Huffington Post insisted that this ruling meant that women “will no longer be able to band together to fight systemic sexual discrimination or harassment in court.” Quartz took this logic a step further and insisted that, though the majority opinion’s language was “coded” (read: legalistic), Gorsuch had dealt a “devastating blow to the #MeToo movement, and the fight for gender equality at work.” To come to this conclusion is to actively ignore Ginsburg, who wrote that the Court’s decision did not “place in jeopardy” anti-discrimination protections for workers.

There are limits to political media’s willingness to serve as Justice Ginsburg’s stenographers, and those limits are usually met when the “Notorious RBG” complicates the realization of liberal objectives. In July of 2016, for example, Ginsberg violated a taboo when she weighed in on presidential politics, expressing unreserved fears over how a prospective Donald Trump presidency could change the country and bench on which she sat. Democrats in the Senate castigated her for getting out “over her skis” and getting “very close to the line” that justices should not cross.

Ginsburg’s offense wasn’t having an opinion that Democrats shared, but expressing it in a way that reinforced Trump supporters’ arguments about the bias inherent in elite American institutions. Suddenly, Ginsburg was “injudicious” and had made a “mistake” by imperiling the court’s apolitical aura, and the justice was eventually compelled to withdraw her remarks. There were no such condemnations of her behavior when she boycotted Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address on similar grounds. After all, many of her fellow Democrats had done the same.

To a disturbing degree, the story that the press tells when it comes to the conduct of the Supreme Court is Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s story. It is through her eyes that they interpret the logic and impact of its decisions, even if that perspective does more to obscure than to clarify the Justices’ thinking—including, ironically, her own. The theology surrounding Ginsburg is doubtlessly unhealthy in a republic of laws, but it is clearly a means to an end. That end is not jurisprudence or even the empowerment of women, but the advancement of liberal policy objectives. When she becomes an impediment to those objectives, few of her so-called allies have any compunction about throwing RBG under the bus.

Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!

For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.

By now, those who began the Trump era convinced that the president was Vladimir Putin’s puppet are surely frustrated by the dearth of supporting evidence. Donald Trump has spent his tenure repaying the Russian Federation for its interference in the 2016 election by imposing stiff sanctions on the Kremlin and its associates, arming the regime’s opponents, and degrading the capabilities of its allies. While there are few areas where Washington and Moscow have collaborated, that is not to say that they do not exist. If there is one particularly important arena where the White House has been happy to cede turf to the Russian president, it is in Syria.

President Donald Trump has made no secret of his desire to see the United States extricate itself from its commitments in Northwestern Syria as soon as possible. In early April, the president announced that all U.S. troops in Syria would be withdrawing “like very soon”—an announcement that confused his State Department and contradicted the statements of his commanding generals, who had assured the public that the American mission in Syria has only just begun. Cooler heads might have convinced Trump not to create a power vacuum in the heart of the former ISIS caliphate on a whim, but the president seems unpersuaded that either U.S. interests or allies in the region are of much value. If America cannot simply cut ties with its partners in Syria, it seems, it will simply allow those relationships to wither on the vine.

Last week, the administration announced that it would cut off all non-humanitarian aid to groups on the ground in Northern Syria. Some $200 million in recovery funds for the region devastated in the fight against ISIS were frozen in late March, and they are not going to be restored. If the civilian infrastructure devastated in that part of Syria is going to be repaired, it won’t be with American reconstruction funds. Among the organizations that the White House has abandoned is the Syrian Civil Defense, known colloquially as the “White Helmets,” which have attracted positive attention from American lawmakers for their highly-publicized efforts to rescue civilians from collapsed buildings over the course of the seven-year Syrian civil war.

All of this will be welcome news in Moscow. Russia has alleged that the “White Helmets” staged a recent chemical weapons attack on civilians in the Damascus suburb of Daouma. Moscow-backed mercenaries and Assad regime forces have repeatedly attempted to make inroads in the territory Americans occupy east of the Euphrates, recently resulting in a bloody armed confrontation between U.S. forces and Russian contractors. A U.S. withdrawal from Northern Syria would allow Russia and Iran to flood the zone while allowing Turkey a substantial presence in the North (where it could at finally neutralize America’s Kurdish allies). More troubling still, American withdrawal could provide enough space for Islamist organizations like ISIS or the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra group to reconstitute themselves. That would serve Assad’s purposes just fine. The existence of brutal Islamist groups creates a favorable contrast with his genocidal but secular regime, and it is a contrast Assad has skillfully deployed to generate Western sympathy for his ruling cabal.

The Trump administration has long sought to enlist Russia’s help in its effort to extricate U.S. troops from that conflict, no matter the costs to U.S. interests. In early 2017, the Trump administration entertained the prospect of ceding its position in Syria as a bargaining chip that, it was thought, might convince Russia to abandon its Iranian allies. It became clear that overture failed when Russian officials began telling regional governments like Israel that Iran’s military presence in Syria was a permanent feature of the landscape.

The Trump administration’s belief that Russia could be convinced to share American aims in Syria did not abate even after the president ordered strikes on Assad regime targets. In July of last year, the Trump administration ended a CIA program that armed and trained anti-Assad regime rebels in the hopes of currying favor with Russia. The president has all but surrendered the post-war planning process to Russia, which began ironing out a power-sharing arrangement with its Turkish and Iranian partners last November.

Despite the souring of Russo-American relations, the Trump White House still appears to cling to the notion that Russian and U.S. interests can align in Syria. In truth, the only alignment is that both Washington and Moscow want to see American soldiers and their Western allies leave. Yet for both the dovish left and the isolationist right, this is the kind of collusion that raises no eyebrows. It is the sacrifice of American influence and allies that generates no calls for Trump’s resignation from the usual suspects on the left. Conservatives, too, are loath to reconcile their conclusion that the “collusion” narrative is hollow with this conspicuous display of deference toward Moscow.

If there is one thing recent history has taught us, it is that Russia is not a reliable steward of U.S. interests. Americans who rediscover their mistrust of Vladimir Putin’s goals only when it suits their partisan interests are invested in a political game. Unfortunately, the stakes are so much higher than that.

Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!

For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.

Human Rights Watch (HRW), an American organization founded in the 1970s as Helsinki Watch to campaign for the release of political prisoners in the Soviet Union, reinvented itself with the end of the Cold War. It is now a political lobby, selectively using human rights and international law to promote the ideological causes of its main patron, George Soros.

Israel is a favorite target for HRW and its long-time leader, Kenneth Roth. With an annual budget of $70 million, the organization produces a stream of “reports” condemning Israel for alleged war crimes and related violations, which are then cited in boycott resolutions and petitions to the International Criminal Court. Roth has stocked the Middle East and North Africa division with a number of BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) and lawfare activists, supported by a highly skilled public relations team.

Omar Shakir is one of HRW’s professional BDSers, hired in 2016 as a “researcher on Palestine.” He applied as a “foreign expert” for an Israeli work visa–routinely provided by the low-level clerks in the Interior Ministry to NGOs, including many deeply involved in propaganda wars. But by this point, the benign image of NGOs was gone, other ministries were consulted, and in early 2017, HRW received a letter denying the application and citing the organization’s track record of demonization. Sixteen years after HRW’s leading role in the infamous NGO Forum of the UN Durban Conference that launched BDS and labeled Israel an “apartheid state,” and nine years after HRW helped shape the Goldstone report fiasco, it appeared that Israel was finally taking NGO demonization seriously.

However, by sending Roth’s organization the response directly and not making it public on its own terms, Israel allowed HRW to control the story and spin the denial as another ostensibly anti-democratic move by the Netanyahu government. A flood of condemnations predictably followed (ignoring the fact that all democracies routinely deny visas on various grounds), and Israel suddenly and inexplicably reversed itself, and Shakir got a one-year visa.

If the ministries, including Strategic Affairs and the Prime Minister’s Office, weighing in on NGO visas expected the reversal to cause HRW or Shakir to tone down the propaganda and seriously take up human rights violations of Hamas, they were wrong. Instead, the anti-Israel accusations and media performances (videos, press conferences, interviews, etc.) intensified. In the past year alone, HRW pushed divestment from Israeli banks, targeted Israel’s membership in FIFA (the international soccer association), called for arms embargoes and ending security cooperation, lobbied the UN to “blacklist” companies doing business in Israel, and petitioned the International Criminal Court to open prosecutions against Israeli officials. In the political theater of human rights, HRW displayed its mastery.

Shakir quickly assumed center stage. In a highly publicized May 2017 trip, he flew to Bahrain, ostensibly to push participants in a meeting of FIFA’s congress to take action against Israel. He also used Bahrain’s refusal to give him a visa to gain favorable press coverage for HRW’s campaign. On social media, he supported proposed US legislation to restrict military aid to Israel, repeating false NGO allegations on theme of systematic mistreatment of Palestinian children.

In response to the government’s apparent ineptness on this issue, an organization known as Shurat HaDin (Israel Law Center) filed suit arguing that Shakir’s activities violated a recent amendment designed to block visas for BDS activists and groups. This triggered a formal review by the ministries involved, and Shakir was informed in November 2017 that his visa was being reviewed. Shortly afterwards, in a particularly cynical move even for HRW, Deputy Director for the Middle East Eric Goldstein suddenly appeared and posted selfies of himself and Israel/Palestine Advocacy Director Sari Bashi at the site of a protest in Jerusalem demanding action to free Avera Mengistu, an Israeli who had crossed into Gaza in 2014 and was being held, along with two others also with mental health issues. Goldstein and Bashi said nothing about the two Israeli soldiers, Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin, killed in the 2014 war. Their bodies are still being held by Hamas, in blatant violation of all human rights norms.

HRW’s token interest in the human rights of Mengistu did not save Shakir’s visa, and he was notified that it would not be renewed. But again, the bureaucratic and political process that has no understanding of the theatrics of human rights gave HRW control over the story. For the second time, and without interference, HRW was able to sell the image of Israel as suppressing legitimate NGO criticism to sympathetic media and diplomatic audiences. Shakir, with the support of the wider NGO network, became the symbol of human rights, victimized by dark right-wing antidemocratic forces. In this role, he was embraced by the EU Delegation in Tel Aviv, including a group selfie with Shakir that described HRW as a “globally renowned” human rights organization.

Shakir and HRW then used the Israeli courts as a stage, claiming that “neither HRW – nor Shakir as its representative – advocate boycott, divestment or sanctions against companies that operate in the settlements, Israel or Israelis (sic).” The Israeli High Court rejected a stay on deportation pending legal review of the case, but Shakir got another round of media interviews and sympathetic coverage. The appeal, which can be expected to repeat the process, will be conducted without his physical presence. HRW will no create a virtual stage for Shakir, as well as sending talented proxies.

In over a year of engagements and skirmishes across many stages, Shakir and HRW emerged with their images enhanced. The Israeli government, in contrast, bumbled through every act–first in the botched handling and then reversal of HRW’s initial visa application, and then by giving HRW the basis for stage managing the decision not to renew it. While government officials belatedly recognized that HRW and soft power warfare are serious threats, their one-dimensional strategies are still blind to the crucial theatrics.

Choose your plan and pay nothing for six Weeks!

For a very limited time, we are extending a six-week free trial on both our subscription plans. Put your intellectual life in order while you can. This offer is also valid for existing subscribers wishing to purchase a gift subscription. Click here for more details.